Science in the cloud
When we started talking to people about an on-line, on demand home for scientists to do their work and to collaborate, we got told that “it won’t happen, they are too competitive and they don’t look after their data or store it properly”. Well maybe that’s true, some people will never want to do more than hack their data in spreadsheets, get out out some graphs to publish and then move on. There are also practical difficulties in handling lots of different proprietary data formats and shipping large data sets around for analysis that also make this difficult. Not surprisingly most scientists stay close to their instruments and do their work using a small set of highly specialised software tools. However, there are many benefits from being able to store data in the cloud and do even the most sophisticated analyses on demand. One of the InkSpot team, Paul Watson, talks about what he and InkSpot are doing to put science in the cloud in a presentation he gave at last week’s Google Tech conference
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